Five of Australia's largest fossil fuel producers could involve hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and put a dollar figure behind the impact after a U.S. research team developed a way to link a single company to a specific climate hazard.

This is the result of a new peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature that seeks to establish a method that allows courts to quantify the economic losses of fossil fuel producers to a climate impact - extreme heat.

From 1991 to 2020, researchers, Christopher Callahan of Stanford University in California, and Justin Mankin of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, used historical emissions data for the world’s five largest oil and oil producers: BP, a gas-based natural pathway, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, ExxonMobil, and Chevrolet.

Then, they try to understand how the emissions of these companies contribute extreme heat. This is defined as the temperature for the five hottest days of the year.

The team developed a replicable method to quantify damage associated with a company, a number that belongs to trillions of dollars in the world's largest fossil fuel producer.

It advised state-owned oil companies Saudi Aramco and Gazpromise AG to incur compensation of 2.05tr and $2TR, respectively. Chevron, Exxonmobil and BP caused losses of $1.98TR, 1.91TR and $1.45TR, respectively.

In an analysis of emission data of five major Australian resource companies – Gold and Silver Continental, Rio de Janeiro, Santos, Whitehaven Coal and Woodside Energy – Callahan assessed the total losses of its collective emissions, with total losses of more than $60 billion, or $92.947 billion.

"Our analysis reflects very clearly on the emissions that have occurred and historical changes in extreme heat and attributes them to emissions that have been found and attributed to specific participants," Callahan said.

“Even so, in terms of the losses associated with any single company, we have gained volumes over the past 30 years when you aggregate the globally globally, but the loss of GDP growth at extreme heat accounts for only a small part of the total cost of climate change.”

The difficulty of establishing causality and calculating a company’s contribution to climate hazards has left courts in many jurisdictions, especially in Australia, reluctant to hold individual fossil fuel producers accountable for the climate impacts of their projects.

When seeking approval to build and operate its $5.6 billion Barossa Gasfield in remote areas of the North Australian coast, Australian oil company Santos asked the Australian Conservation Foundation if it had considered potential climate hazards.

Santos argued that “there are limitations in linking activity from activity to the impact of any particular climate change”.

"Santos invites ACF to provide further information on how climate change can be conducted from the impact of activities to specific environments or ecosystems," the company said.

Callahan said the work sets the stage for future research, linking the activities of specific oil, gas and coal producers to other climate hazards such as drought, flooding and sea level rise, although he added that there is still a "long way to go" in tobacco or asbestos litigation.

"Up until two weeks ago, it was unclear whether scientific support said that a single emitter could be related to the impact of the prosecution, or that you are trying to recover costs for the cost. This could definitely make a scientific connection."

“No longer scientifically supports participants, believing that there is reasonable deniality, it is impossible to connect any individual actors to any impact of climate change.

“That kind of statement, there is a gap between where you are sending out and where other influences are, and we show that this is fallacious.”

Some major lawsuits have been filed against major U.S. oil companies, including other cases filed by Puerto Rico v ExxonMobil and by various U.S. state governments.

Hawaii became the tenth state in the United States to send fossil fuel producers to court on Friday for suspected climate deception, prompting a counterattack from the Trump administration to try to block filing.

Australia is the world's second largest activity jurisdiction, with 627 cases currently tracking, according to the Melbourne Law School's Climate Change Litigation Database.

Many of these cases include smaller decisions involving council plans, regulations, or access to information, as the database uses a broader definition.